Music Arcades: Klaus Schulze: Dune

£6.49 from Our Price in about 1982, around the same time I got that first Conrad Schnitzler album.

Dune came out in 1979, and I was curious at first to discover how similar it might be to Trancefer, which I had bought previously, though it came out a couple of years later. And then I was curious all over again this week, as it's so long since I listened to it that I'd completely forgotten how it sounds.

Answer: perhaps not as similar as I'd hoped. Wolfgang Tiepold's cello is still there, but not Michael Shrieve's percussion. The 30 minutes of the title track on Side 1 are what Schulze referred to as his "floating music", because there's no beat. In fact there's no readily discernable form, either, just the cello and various synth lines snaking their way round each other — Tiepold doesn't get a co-composer credit, so I assume that means that Schulze wrote all this out in advance rather than relying on improvisation. Twenty seven years ago, I'd have got restless trying to listen to this. Today I'm more patient — but still not exactly gripped. (However, I've just noticed that allmusic rates this track among Schulze's finest ever.)

Side 2, Shadows of Ignorance starts off more similar to Trancefer, but after eight minutes, Arthur Brown's singing comes in. When I first started listening to the Freak Zone in 2003, Arthur Brown was guest presenter for a couple of shows, and he did a fine job; articulate and interesting, and duly freaky. He does OK on Shadows of Ignorance too, but when he starts his chant, Klaus puts his sequencers on autopilot and nips out for a fag. The other challenge is the lyrics, which were written by Schulze. With his penchant for awful punning titles, they could have been worse, I guess. Mostly they're not too much of a distraction, but then along comes a line like "Destiny is what you do when you're YOU" (capitalisation in the original, as provided on the inner sleeve). Ker-lunk.